


Legends of Valyria

by Perfidious_Albion



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Classical References, Gen, Historical Style, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 14:33:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 16,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17184800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perfidious_Albion/pseuds/Perfidious_Albion
Summary: Five-thousand years before 'A Game of Thrones', the mightiest empire the world had ever seen rose to power on the wings of dragons. The rise of the dragonlords spread across Essos their roads, their cities, their High Valyrian tongue... and chains to the millions whom they enslaved.An imaginary history of the Freehold of Valyria, from its legendary origins, to kingdom, to revolution, to war, and to the slavocratic empire of terror it became.Disclaimers: (A) this belongs to George Martin and not to me; (B) I am shamelessly filching from classical mythology and history.





	1. The Dragon, the Shepherd and the Sorceress

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all. This is something I made for world-building for an alternate-ASOIAF-world project, but all of it takes place so far in the past that it could just as easily apply to canon. Other people may find it interesting, entertaining and/or useful for their own world-building thoughts & suchlike, so here it is.

She rose from her mountain nest and free as the wind she flew. Above the white clouds rode the beast of silver scales. Mighty was she, and all fled from her, stags and bears and wolves and lions and all other prey. Even among her own kind, none dared to defy her. She grew greater and swifter than any of them. None could withstand her, like her mother and her mother's mother, in the dominion of dragons before the age of men.

Then men came for the first time to the land of the Fourteen Flames. Shepherds they were, taking their flocks to graze in the warm land to the west of Lhazar whence they had come, for men there had grown too great in number. Kings they made from among themselves, to rule over them. And the kings were many, and made war on one another as they had done in Lhazar whence they had come. They made arrows and spears, and they slew stags and bears and wolves and lions, and they hewed forests, and they made wide flat grasslands for their sheep to feed.

But their spears could not pierce thick hide, and their arrows could not contend with fire. They could never slay the dragons.

She encountered men, as her mother and her mother's mother had not, and yet she hunted free and unafraid, no less than her mother and her mother's mother. The men had slain too many of her prey, so she was hungry, for dragons, like men, need sustenance to live. And so she descended upon their flocks and she fed on their sheep, instead of the wild beasts that had once sustained her. Shepherds oft fled from her, for she was too mighty by far to slay. But there were times they fought her, seeking to destroy her with their arrows and their spears. They failed, and her fire was their undoing. Men feared her greatly, as they feared other dragons who did the same. But they could not stop her. They prayed to their shepherd god to kill her, but the shepherd god was false, so their prayers were never answered.

There came a night when she espied a village on a hill, where men grazed their flocks, and she had a great hunger, and so she descended upon the village to feed. And she was seen, for she was vast as a palace and the moonlight caressed her shining scales and danced in her violet eyes. But the men of this village were new to this land, freshly come from Lhazar, and so they knew naught of dragons. Worse, they did not heed the wisdom of those who knew more than they. Thrice did their neighbours advise them to leave the dragon to her meal, for she would eat and be gone and then they would not be slain, and thrice did they ignore them. The men of the village awoke swiftly, and they gathered their arrows and their spears, and they sought to destroy her, and they perished in her silver fire.

But there was one in that village who was called Maerhelle, as ancient as she was powerful, consort of demons, by far more learned in the black arts than any sorcerer or witch who has ever lived after her. She had sons, long since passed. They had sons, long since passed. But they had sons who were bold young men, still living until they warred against the dragon, and thus fell. And she was wroth when she awoke.

Maerhelle had not the power to walk, and there were no horses in those days. She bade the women of the village bear her to the place where the dragon was feeding. In her anger and her hate she raised the first finger on her left hand, and the dragon was trapped as if by chains of steel, and tried though she may, she could not move.

“Hear me, beast!” called the witch in her cracked voice. “Your kind may not pluck sheep from men's flocks whenever you please. Such is your arrogance that you believe that you may steal from us and slay us whenever you wish! You may not. This is men's land now. It is no longer the time of dragons.”

The dragon growled in rage, and breathed fire at Maerhelle, seeking to free herself. Feeding was no longer on her mind. She merely sought to escape. But the witch raised the second finger on her left hand, and the fire was doused by a great downpour from the heavens, fiercer than any natural storm. She raised the third finger, and the dragon's mouth snapped shut.

“You have slain the sons of many here,” said the witch over the noise of raindrops, “and the sons of the sons of my sons. That grief will be with us forever. You cannot flee, for we cannot flee from what you have done. It is within my power to slay you, but I shall not. That would be too swift an escape. Instead I shall make you become what you disdain. You will suffer as we have suffered.”

Maerhelle lifted the fourth finger of her left hand, and there was a great darkness that blotted out the stars. The very world trembled.

“This I foretell, and this is my revenge,” the witch said. As vengeful Maerhelle spoke the darkness went away, and the other women of the village went away, and she went away with them. They returned to the land of Lhazar, and she became once more a counsellor to kings, as she had been.

The dragon was cold. She did not understand the cold. She had never felt it before. She was wet, too. The heavens had opened and rain was still falling in great quantity. The water poured all over her. She shivered, and did not know why she was shivering. She tried to fly away, but could not. She touched her form and her hide felt strange beneath her claws. The world was larger than it had been, and all things seemed threatening.

Now there was a shepherd boy of another village, whose name was Ancaesys. He had not yet seen ten namedays. He was watching his flock in the night, miles from the hill, but in a flash of lightning he saw a figure alone on the hilltop, and pity touched his heart. “I will go to the hill,” he said to himself, “and I will save this poor man who is alone on the hilltop.”

So the boy drove his flock all the way to the hill, heedless of the danger of a nearby dragon. And behold! He saw no man but a fair maiden, with eyes like deep pools and hair like starlight. She was alone, and had no cloak to protect her from the storm. She was cold, and wet, and shivering.

Ancaesys removed his own lambswool cloak, and he dried her, and he gave it to her, so that she could be warm and dry. He took pity on her, and took her to his own home, though it was only a small wooden hut, for she had nowhere else to go. He fed her and clothed her and gave her a place where she could sleep in shelter. He asked the maiden her name. When she told him she did not have one, he gave her a name, for the way he had found her: Vaeneriña, “Thunder Maiden”.

Vaeneriña wedded Ancaesys the merciful ten years after, and she bore for him a single son, whom he named Aenys. They lived together in a small wooden hut, and he was happy till the end of his days.


	2. The Dragontamer and His House

Aenys halfwyrm grew to be a handsome lad, taller than his father or mother and very strong. He had eyes like deep pools and hair like starlight. He loved to sing and dance, and his voice was sweet, and the women of the village took delight in the sound and sight of him. Like his mother, Aenys could not be a shepherd, for sheep fled from him as if he were a mortal peril. He and his mother needed his father to provide food for the family. But in time his father grew old and grey, whereas his mother's youth and beauty never faded, for her woman's form was not natural but a sorcerous artifice of vengeful Maerhelle's curse. When his father died of sickness, Aenys was a boy of thirteen, yet lovely Vaeneriña looked no older than she had done on the day she bore him. As the women of the village took delight in the sound and sight of Aenys, the men of the village took delight in the sound and sight of lovely Vaeneriña, and many of them wished to wed her. But when Ancaesys the merciful passed beyond the world, Vaeneriña was grieved. She had no wish to wed again. Aenys loved to sing and dance and he had no liking for war, yet he became a sellsword nonetheless, for he could not let his mother go hungry.  
  
Aenys halfwyrm proved to be a proficient warrior. He fought well for several kings in their wars against each other for land and gold and women. One day, after a war had ended with one king taking the lands and daughters of another, he and some other sellswords were travelling homeward, and a hungry dragon descended upon them. The blue dragon dived out of the sky, its talons gleaming, its wings spread, fire issuing from its maw. The sellswords were consumed in flame. This was not too uncommon a fate. Dragons ate both sheep and men. With most of their prey slaughtered to provide grazing lands for men's flocks of sheep, they ate what they could. Ancaesys's son might have become just another of these, but Aenys halfwyrm was also Vaeneriña's. In his terror and his rage, he drew upon a power that dwelt deep within himself. The dragonfire parted about his arms like a river flowing around a rock, leaving him unharmed, not even warm. And when he called out in a mighty voice “Stop!” the dragon stopped and hovered before him.  
  
Aenys was amazed that he still breathed. He had long known that he and his mother did not look like other men and women, but he had no understanding of the power that had saved his life. Nonetheless, he perceived that the blue dragon was obeying him. He commanded the dragon to lie on the ground, and he clambered upon the dragon's neck, and the dragon flew to Ancaesys's old home where lovely Vaeneriña dwelt.  
  
Vaeneriña explained to Aenys halfwyrm the tale of what she was and what he was, a tale she had never confided in Ancaesys. It pleased her greatly to learn that her beloved son had some measure of the power that had been in her until Maerhelle's witchcraft had barred it from her, that he was not condemned to lose everything she had lost. Fire did the bidding of his thoughts, and its creatures, dragons, did the bidding of his words. The blue dragon obeyed his every command, and he gave it a name: _Navar_ , “lake”.  
  
Aenys never again served as a sellsword. He had no need to. Men-at-arms serving kings never again harassed the people of Aenys's village for gold or food, for those who tried perished in Navar's blue fire. Dragons never again fed from the flocks of this village, for Aenys would simply command them to leave if they ever came near. With Navar doing his bidding, the men and women of his village soon started to obey him too. They gave food to him, his mother and Navar in exchange for his protection. Aenys halfwyrm could have made himself a great king and conqueror, for he was mightier than any king who ever lived. It would be of little difficulty for him to overthrow all the kings in the land. But he had no taste for power or wealth. Crowns and feasts mattered nothing to him. He chose to rule nothing but his own village and four other villages nearby, and even that, only because Navar the blue needed food aplenty. Aenys Vaeneriña's son preferred to live simply in the small hut that had been his father's once.  
  
He did, however, have a taste for women. Aenys halfwyrm was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a sweet voice and eyes like deep pools and hair like starlight and a love of dance and song. Many women sought him out, some attracted by his power, others simply by his beauty, and he never turned them away. He married many wives—a practice long condoned by the priests of the shepherd god—and they bore for him many sons.  
  
Forty-one were the sons of Aenys halfwyrm, son of Ancaesys and Vaeneriña, by twenty-three wives, though some of those wives did not bear him children. Valarys, his first wife, bore him great-hearted Nimar. Damonys bore him Taeranax swiftspear and Belaeron the tall. Rhaena bore him Lintaeryx of the bloody spear, Tordamyx fleetfoot, long-haired Targarys and Selaelon the brave. Manae bore him Comerys the wise, fierce Tarhaer, thrice-wed Nahaer and Dañonel the resolute. Baelanne bore him Haelarys the pitiless and Jolar bane of kings. Haega bore him Vaenyx strongshield. Lormaena bore him Jaehaegon the war-hungry, broad-shouldered Masydion and Caranyx the shipbuilder. Siqolys bore him Taelar the strong and sharp-eyed Qoharyx. Lymelle bore him high-hearted Taerion, glorious Lantaerion and Volantaerion of the hawk's eyes. Vaella bore him Trevynor, master of the war-cry. Daena bore him ill-fated Celaenax, Hadraer the mighty, Rhaelinon the bold and Caekar the far-shooter. Naemya bore him pious Voltarmax, Monitrrel of the fearful shield and Qaegel the cunning. Rhaenys bore him Vadaelon of the fiery heart and Malaerys tamer of horses. Samys bore him far-famed Jaenor, Qarmon stonefist, resourceful Sanor, Anaenon longspear and Adraesel the river-burner. Viserra bore him Qrilaer of the blowing warhorn, ice-eyed Minarnax and Gadar the tireless. And his last wife Daella bore him his youngest son, Daelyx the kind.  
  
All the sons of Aenys halfwyrm had great fates ahead of them, though for some those lives would be happier than for others. He placed a dragon egg in the cradle of each of his sons, and every one of them would grow to be a dragonrider. All of his children inherited a share of his magic. They could not summon or command fire, except to protect their own bodies from its fury. No fire ever burnt a quarterwyrm child. The voices of the quarterwyrms did not hold the same absolute compulsive power over all dragons as the voice of Aenys, but all dragons were strongly inclined to obey them, unless their commands went greatly against the dragons' desires, and their own dragons obeyed them always.  
  
Aenys son of Ancaesys and Vaeneriña knew that his sons could not live with him forever, for he could not house them all, and they needed great lands to feed their dragons. Yet he did not wish to conquer. And so he arranged good marriages for the eldest forty of his sons, all to princesses. Kings petitioned him on bended knee on their daughters' behalf, begging for a match, and even offered to set aside their own sons from succession to their kingdoms to make their daughters their heirs, so fiercely did they wish to gain dragonriders as their sons by marriage, knowing that a dragonrider would prefer to be heir than to be merely heir's goodbrother. For they knew that not all men were as peaceful as Aenys halfwyrm, and a king who had no dragonrider to support him would be easy prey for a king who had one. None of the sons of Aenys would go to war with one another, for they loved one another as brothers, but in the future, their descendants would.  
  
Aenys halfwyrm also had a single daughter, Moñaena, daughter of Viserra, the fourth to last of his wives. He tried to find a marriage for her to a king or prince, or even a chieftain or warrior, but none accepted. Moñaena had forty-one dragonrider brothers who loved her and would defend her, but she herself had no dragon to ride, for her father and her mother and her grandmother had not expected her to live, so she had never had the chance to make a young dragon her own. For she was not fair of form. Of all of the beauty that the gods had granted to the quarterwyrm brothers, they had deprived her. Whereas all of her brothers stood straight and were handsome, tall and strong, Moñaena quarterwyrm was partly scaled, and short, and hunched over, and she had no breasts, and she had small stubs of dragon-wings upon her back. Men said that she would surely never reach adulthood, and, after she did, that she would surely never bear a living child. It was said she was the ugliest woman the gods had ever made, and many men mocked her, though few were so foolish as to dare speak ill of her in the hearing of her father or her brothers.  
  
And so the daughter of Aenys remained, as the sons of Aenys left their father's house.  
  
In time, sickness and age caught up to Aenys, and he died having seen seventy namedays. Vaeneriña, eternally young and lovely in a body she despised, threw herself into the mouth of Navar in her grief, slaying herself upon his teeth. So distraught was Navar to have caused the death of Vaeneriña, once a silver dragon, that he slew himself with his own mighty claws. And so the vengeance of the witch Maerhelle was complete, for the dragon died knowing what it was to be a human, and to be a mother, and to lose a son.  



	3. Valys Citybuilder and the Founding of Valyria

Five years after its master's end, the house of Aenys was near empty, and only one dragon remained in Aenys's lands. But it was not empty. For Daelyx the kind, youngest son of Aenys halfwyrm, had only seen eight namedays when his father passed away, so he was not yet promised to wed. Nevertheless his hand in marriage was greatly sought, for the fame of Aenys had spread far and wide, and there were many kings who feared for their future if their heirs were not quarterwyrm. He could have chosen any of many beautiful princesses whose hands were offered to him. When he was fourteen, Daelyx meant to accept a match with a lovely princess, daughter to a great and powerful king, who swore that if Daelyx accepted his offer he would pay a vast dowry and put aside his son, making Daelyx the heir to a great kingdom. But he saw his sister Moñaena weeping, for he was the last of her brothers who still dwelt in their father's house, and once he left she would have no-one, and no man would ever wed her. And Daelyx the kind took pity on his sister. He gracefully declined the offer of the princess, and he wed Moñaena quarterwyrm in their father's house, and she was happy.

Years passed. The sons of Aenys inherited kingdoms from their goodfathers, and soon all the kings for many miles around were dragonriders. And Moñaena bore Daelyx two children, a daughter, Laena, and a son, Valys. Valys was as handsome as his father and Laena was no less hideous than her mother.

Thus the Forty-One Families were born, the only families that would ever have dragons in their power, all of them born of the blood of lovely Vaeneriña, the blood of the dragon. They were named like so. House Nimarys were the heirs of great-hearted Nimar the eldest son. Houses Taeranon and Belaerys the heirs of Taeranax swiftspear and Belaeron the tall. Houses Lintaerion, Tordamion, Targaryen and Selaelys the heirs of Lintaeryx of the bloody spear, Tordamyx fleetfoot, long-haired Targarys and Selaelon the brave. Houses Comeryen, Tarherys, Naherys and Dañonal the heirs of Comerys the wise, fierce Tarhaer, thrice-wed Nahaer and Dañonel the resolute. Houses Haelaryen and Jolarys the heirs of Haelarys the pitiless and Jolar bane of kings. House Vaenion the heirs of Vaenyx strongshield. Houses Jaehaegys, Masydis and Caranion the heirs of Jaehaegon the war-hungry, broad-shouldered Masydion and Caranyx the shipbuilder. Houses Taelarys and Qoharion the heirs of Taelar the strong and sharp-eyed Qoharyx. Houses Taeris, Lantaeris and Volantaeris the heirs of high-hearted Taerion, glorious Lantaerion and Volantaerion of the hawk's eyes. House Trevynarr the heirs of Trevynor, master of the war-cry. Houses Celaenon, Hadrerys, Rhaelinys and Caekarys the heirs of ill-fated Celaenax, Hadraer the mighty, Rhaelinon the bold and Caekar the far-shooter. Houses Voltarmon, Monitrral and Qaegal the heirs of pious Voltarmax, Monitrrel of the fearful shield and Qaegel the cunning. Houses Vadaelys and Malaeryen the heirs of Vadaelon of the fiery heart and Malaerys tamer of horses. Houses Jaenarr, Qarmys, Sanarr, Anaenys and Adraesal the heirs of far-famed Jaenor, Qarmon stonefist, resourceful Sanor, Anaenon longspear and Adraesel the river-burner. Houses Qrilerys, Minarnon and Gadarys the heirs of Qrilaer of the blowing warhorn, ice-eyed Minarnax and Gadar the tireless. And last and youngest, House Daelion, descended from hideous Moñaena and Daelyx the kind.

In time, the sons of Aenys halfwyrm died, and their sons by their royal wives inherited kingdoms from them. But though these sons could ride dragons, as no man who was not of Vaeneriña's bloodline ever could, they did not have all the powers of their fathers the children of Aenys. They could not walk through flames unharmed, and they could not make dragons obey them except for their own dragons, of which there were no more than one for each dragonrider. Even their own dragons were merely inclined, not compelled, to serve them, and would disobey them if their commands went greatly against the dragons' own desires. But Valys and Laena Daelion had the blood of the dragon in one quarter share, and so both were as powerful as their mother and father. Daelyx the kind thought to tell his brothers of this, but Valys received a vision from the true gods of the Fourteen Flames, instructing him on what he must do, and he informed his father. So the elder forty of the Forty-One Families were told not, and knew not.

And so it came to pass that Valys Daelion, son of Daelyx the kind, heir of the youngest of the Forty-One Families, was secretly mightier than his cousins. After all of the sons of Aenys were dead, he revealed his strength. The other forty dragonriding families could not withstand him, for their own dragons respected his and his sister's orders more than theirs. And so, fearing his power, they bowed to him, and delivered their crowns into his possession, to be melted by dragonfire. All in the land acknowledged his rule, for many miles around.

Valys Daelion led his cousins to the Fourteen Flames, as the true gods had commanded him. The worship of the false shepherd god, who had never answered prayers, was cast aside. There he declared he would build temples to the gods who had shown him the way, and around those fourteen temples he would build a town which would be the centre of his power and the centre of civilisation. The town was named for the man who had the vision to build it, and it would grow to be the greatest city the world had ever seen, Valyria. Each of the Forty-One Families except one was granted the title of 'Lord of Valyria', to be held by the family head. For Valys citybuilder took upon himself a higher title. He was the first and founding King of Valyria, and House Daelion would reign thereafter, as long as the Kingdom of Valyria remained.


	4. The Daelion Kings

Ever since House Daelion defeated the rest of the Forty-One Families, all of the others would wed brother to sister, as the royal House did, for they sought to regain the powers that they had lost by outbreeding the blood of the dragon. Vaeneriña's blood gave them a certain resilience, preventing the inbreeding from turning them into cripples who could not eat or walk, but they did not succeed. For they could never return to being of her blood in one quarter measure, no matter how many times they bred together men and women who had her blood in one eighth measure or less. The only way was to breed with the royal House. But the royal House always wed brother to sister, and the men of House Daelion took care that they must never sire children on any woman who was not of their House. Due to affairs out of wedlock, there soon arose many in the Kingdom of Valyria who had the blood of the dragon in some small share, despite not being of the Forty-One Families. But there were none who had the blood of the dragon in more than one eighth measure, except in the royal House. All the men of House Daelion were as lovely as Daelyx, and all the women were as hideous as Moñaena. It is guessed this was the legacy of Ancaesys and Vaeneriña, with the appearance of their male descendants owing a great deal to the human Ancaesys and less to Vaeneriña and the appearance of their female descendants owing a great deal to Vaeneriña's true self and less to Ancaesys. However, those who had the blood of the dragon in lesser share than the royal House were not so tightly bound to that legacy. Their menfolk were greatly less blessed with beauty of face and form than Daelyx and the other sons of Aenys, but their womenfolk were not cursed with deformity like Moñaena. The marriage of Daelion men with Daelion women, repeated in every generation, inspired and fascinated generations of Valyrian poets and artists long after the Kingdom's end. For there, in that union of supreme beauty and supreme ugliness, lay the root of a power unrivalled in the world.  
  
For more than two-hundred years, the Kings of Valyria reigned in splendour. They did not conquer further, but only because they had little interest in it. Their power was too great to withstand. The city of Valyria grew, and men worshipped faithfully at the temples of the Fourteen Flames, and all was peaceful and prosperous.  
  
But power begets pride, and the power of the royal House was without limit, and so their pride grew correspondingly vast. Many years after the death of Valys citybuilder, the princes and kings of his line conceived in their thought that nothing should be forbidden from them. In their pride they became arrogant, and in their arrogance they became cruel. They plundered the wealth of the people with high taxes, though they lived in the great royal palace on the Hill of Meraxes and some of their people lived in small huts. They allowed their dragons to roam free and steal sheep from their people's herds instead of paying for mutton, when many of the Valyrian people needed the milk and meat of their sheep to live. They neglected the poor folk of the city, who starved in times of need. And they resented that they, mightiest of men in the world, must lay only with the most hideous of women, so they lay with common women of the city against their will, though they took care never to sire children on them. The Valyrian people were outraged. But the Lords of Valyria were strong, and the Kings of Valyria were even stronger, and so the people could not overthrow them. And so their rule persisted.  
  
The seventh King of Valyria, who was the fourth to be named Valys, was crueller than any of his predecessors, and he had a son, Prince Daelyx, who was crueller still. In all the time since, mothers have not given their sons those names among the people of Valyria. Daelyx often dined with younger Lords of Valyria and the heirs of elder ones, and they spoke, and their discussion turned to their wives. High-flying Vaegon Lintaerion, son to the head of that House, who loved nothing more than to compete in the races of dragons, claimed that no woman was as humble and good as his own sister-wife Daenerys, and this sparked a fire of argument. Each of the young men boasted that his wife was the most virtuous, save only for the prince, who was silent and left on his handsome face no clue as to his thoughts. And as they were heated by wine, it occurred to them to visit their wives by surprise, and see their occupation at this hour. And many were engaged in great banquets with each other. But white-armed Daenerys Lintaerion was toiling on her wool, though it was late at night. And so the contest was won by high-flying Vaegon, and the young men laughed, and did not hold ill feeling, and soon forgot. But cruel Prince Daelyx did not forget, and he was tempted, as much by the chastity of white-armed Daenerys as by her beauty, though she was very fair. And he conceived in his mind an evil thought.  
  
It came to pass that Valyria was at war with the mighty city of Haros many miles distant, which sought to conquer Valyria. King Valys sent forth the Lords of Valyria to battle, while he himself remained to rule. This itself was right and proper, and common in that time. Greater cities often sought to conquer smaller ones, and Valyria was still a young city, smaller than many others, and distant places doubted the truth of its power over dragons. It would be many hundreds of years later that the Valyrians first encountered the cities of Oros and Tyria, which were more distant by far than Haros. And Daelyx too asked to remain behind, not to command the Valyrian host. This was against custom, but proud Valys granted it. And cruel Prince Daelyx visited an estate on the Hill of Mahazyrys, where House Lintaerion dwelt. He was welcomed generously with a great feast, more than was due even for his lofty place, for ox-eyed Maenys, mother to high-flying Vaegon, did not suspect his intent. The prince ate and drank freely. And at night, after all others had gone to sleep, he came to the bedchamber of white-armed Daenerys, and he entered, and he placed a hand upon her breast. Daenerys awoke, and was afraid. Daelyx sought to persuade her to give herself to him, swearing that her brother and her lord father would not be told, but all his power and beauty were insufficient, and she recoiled from him, and bade him be gone from her bedchamber. And cruel Daelyx was angered. For he was a prince of Valyria, he said, and none save the King must presume to give him any command that he did not wish to obey. He said that she must be punished for her presumption, and he seized her, and as she struggled against his grip he lay with her in the manner of the Kings of Valyria, so that she would not bear his children. He left her in her bed, but even now his lust was not satisfied. Ere he departed, cruel Daelyx commanded white-armed Daenerys that she must come tomorrow to the palace on the Hill of Meraxes, and she must attend him every night henceforth, after others had gone to sleep, and if ever she did not appear then he would slay her brother.  
  
White-armed Daenerys cleaned herself, and told nothing to her mother, and she did the bidding of the cruel prince. But she did not forget. When the war with Haros was ended, the menfolk of the Forty-One Families, save for House Daelion, returned to the city their home. She spoke to her father Lamion of the strong arm, head of House Lintaerion and a Lord of Valyria, and to her brother, and she told them of her disgrace. And she told them that even the King of Valyria, proud Valys, had seen it, and the King had laughed, and he had called her a whore, and he had told his son only to be careful that her lord father did not discover the truth, not to cease in the rape. And high-flying Vaegon and Lamion of the strong arm waxed exceedingly wroth, with the fury of dragonfire.  
  
At night the men of House Lintaerion summoned men of the other dragonriding families to their estate, and told them what was even now transpiring, and of the infamy of the King. The other forty of the Forty-One Families were in horror, yet they dared not confront the King of Valyria openly, for his strength was greater than theirs. Their own dragons would obey his orders and not theirs, if they ever did battle against him. White-armed Daenerys could slay cruel Daelyx if she brought a dagger to their bed, but she could not slay the others of the royal House, and any blow against House Daelion had to be swift and complete or else they would all be slain in royal vengeance. If so, none would remain in the city with even a hope of defying the King, and Daelion cruelty would grow greater. Yet they could not allow such an outrage to go unpunished. Grief and anger struck the Lords of Valyria, and they pondered how they could stop the King of Valyria and his cruel son from doing whatever they wished, and they knew not.  
  
In the morning of the next day, the Lords of Valyria were approached by some of the men of the city, and they met again in the afternoon. For there were those in Valyria who had long been unhappy with the harsh rule of the later Daelions. They were common men, not of the blood of the dragon. They did not have silver hair or purple eyes. For there would come a time when that appearance would be ever-present among the Valyrian people, when all Valyrians would be of the blood of the dragon, but that time was a thousand years after the founding of the Freehold. At this time, most of the Valyrian people did not descend from Ancaesys the merciful and from lovely Vaeneriña. And yet the common people spoke, and the gathered Lords of Valyria heeded them.  
  
The people had a way to overthrow the King, if the Lords of Valyria would work with them. But they would not dethrone a proud and cruel king only to replace him with equally proud and equally cruel lords who would care nothing for the common people of Valyria. The brave common men who resisted the King of Valyria conceived in their thoughts an idea that had never been seen before, anywhere in the world. They believed that there could be a state without a king, under the sovereignty of the people. This was to be the Valyrian Freehold. All of the folk of the city, every man born free in the city of Valyria, were to be freeholders, entitled to certain rights and privileges that nobody could take away, not even a dragonrider. Two great assemblies were to be made. One was the Council of Forty, with one seat for the head of each family of dragonriders, to govern the affairs of the dragonriders, and the other was the Council of Four-Thousand, chosen by the votes of all freeholders, to govern the affairs of the city as a whole. In practice, many affairs concerned both councils and were not clearly the province of one or of the other, so there was an endless power-struggle between the two. And yet this power-struggle was peaceful, a matter of politics and not of war. And the voice of the people of the city was never, ever wholly silenced again.  
  
The Lords of Valyria accepted these terms, forging a compromise with the resistance of the common people that included the existence of the Council of Forty and the preservation of their property, rather than seizing the property of all men in the city and sharing it evenly among the freeholders, as some in the resistance had proposed. The Lords of Valyria changed their titles to signify their allegiance to the Freehold's cause, becoming the Lords Freeholder of Valyria. The Lords Freeholder and the leaders of the resistance of the common people visited the temples of all the Fourteen Flames, and in each and every temple they repeated the same oath, pledging the eternal allegiance of themselves and all their descendants to the Valyrian Freehold, now and forever, and asking the gods to bring everlasting punishment to the soul of any who broke this sacred vow. They swore solemnly that they would oppose to the bitter end any man who may ever seek to become King of Valyria. All freeholders of Valyria, from the poorest of the common people to the mightiest of the Lords Freeholder, would swear this same oath before all of the gods for thousands of years to come, so that the people would never again suffer under the rule of kings.  
  
The plan to overthrow the King of Valyria could not have succeeded without the help of the common people. The Lords Freeholder and the other dragonriders of their families would arise on dragonback, all at the same time, and fly swiftly to the Hill of Meraxes, and burn the King's palace to the ground from above. The Daelions could walk through raging flames unharmed, but they were not immune to being crushed to death by the falling timbers of their own palace. However, the King of Valyria and his family slept in bedchambers quite near to their dragons. The Daelions could not be allowed to reach their dragons, or else they would escape into the air and their voices would be heard by the dragons of the rest of the Forty-One Families. If that happened, the dragons of the Freehold would obey the Daelions and betray their own riders. But the resistance of the common people had infiltrated the servants in the palace. They did not have enough men in the palace to kill the Daelions, for the royal family were heavily guarded, and most of the men who worked in the palace were loyal to House Daelion because the King allowed them to take plunder and pleasure as they wished from the Valyrian people. But they had enough to delay the royal family for the crucial few minutes that it would take for the dragons of the Freehold to rise into the air and burn the palace to the ground, ending House Daelion forever.  
  
These twenty-seven brave men, sacrificing their lives to end the time of kings, would long be remembered with honour as the founding martyrs of the Freehold. For thousands of years, children would be taught to recite their names, and prayers would be offered for their souls. They were common-born, and yet they were remembered with more honour than any Lord Freeholder of Valyria.  
  
All these things would come, in time. But on the day when the sacred oaths between the Lords Freeholder and the common people had been sworn, it was late in the afternoon, after all the pledges had been made, and the Lords Freeholder, many other dragonriders and many men of the resistance of the common people of Valyria were gathered in the estate of House Haelaryen. White-armed Daenerys Lintaerion asked the representatives of the people in a sweet voice whether, if they sent word to their men in the palace, they could be ready to act today. They answered that they could. “Good,” said white-armed Daenerys, “for then there is no purpose that I must endure for.” And she drew a dagger and stabbed herself in the chest.  
  
Then high-flying Vaegon her brother was shocked and much grieved, and all the gathered people were dismayed, for the death of one so virtuous and so fair. They grasped the dagger, red with Daenerys's blood, and passed it from one man to the next, and to the next, and so on. Each man, roused to fury by injustice, shouted in his rage. And from a thousand throats, one by one, men of all sizes and classes of the city, from the lowest of beggars to the mightiest of dragonriders, there issued the same cry:  
  
“ _Death to the King_!”  
  
“ _Death to the King_!”  
  
“ _Death to the King_!”


	5. The Invasion of Valyria

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Over time, imitating real tales, this is moving gradually from a more mythical tone to a more historical tone. The story of Vaeneriña is clearly a myth; by the end, it will be pretty historical. There is no single line which you can draw and say "everything before this is myth, everything after this is history". It's too gradual for that. But if I had to declare such a line, I would place it here.

The Valyrian Freehold was born as it would die, in fire. King Valys IV Daelion, remembered in Valyrian histories as Valys the Foul, and the rest of his House perished in flames from the dragons of the other forty of the Forty-One Families. Legend has it that the Kings of Valyria were even more magically formidable than the dragonriders whose power would forge the mightiest empire the world had ever seen, and that by their mystical powers they could walk through fire unharmed and command any dragon and have their words heeded. Whether or not these things are true—some maesters have suggested that the terrifying power of the Daelion kings was exaggerated over the years by folk memory, in order to tell a more gripping story of their tyranny and their eventual overthrow by the people whom they had oppressed—they were certainly not immune to their own royal palace collapsing upon them as it fell apart under the fiery onslaught. House Daelion died that day, never to return.  
  
The rebellious cityfolk of Valyria were immediately confronted with crisis. Word of the downfall of the Valyrian monarchy and the installation of a new form of government, whereby cities would rule themselves without any kings, spread quickly to the surrounding cities, many of which were larger and more populous than Valyria. The kings of these cities would scarcely have cared if Valys the Foul had been replaced by a king from a different House—what did a foreign usurpation matter to them?—but they were alarmed in the extreme by the creation of the Valyrian Freehold. At the time, this idea was utterly new and terribly dangerous for any man who ruled over powerless subjects. They dared not allow the young freehold to succeed, or else their own people might start to get ideas.  
  
The result was swift. There was a meeting between the kings of eleven other cities in the southern part of what would later be known (in no small part due to their actions) as the Valyrian peninsula. These kings agreed to join their strength against the Valyrian Freehold. They justified their alliance on religious grounds, for all the men in the land worshipped the Great Shepherd except for the Valyrians with their gods of earth and fire who lived in, or gave favour to, or were represented by, or _were_ the Fourteen Flames. (The complex theology of traditional Valyrian religion is beyond the scope of this work.) Thus an effort to crush opposition to monarchy was painted as a religious war against decadent heathens who had turned away from all that was right and decent… including rule over the people by kings, of course.  
  
The Valyrian people had less than a turn of the moon to hold their first 'choosing' for the newborn Council of Four-Thousand, the first democratic institution in the world, which would govern them henceforth, and to establish courts of law and non-royal tax collectors and men to maintain roads and men to collect refuse and other civil institutions in peacetime. After that, their main concern was war. The coalition of cities opposed to the uprising against monarchy began by amassing a large army and sending it to invade Valyria. They were confident of victory, for the Valyrians were grotesquely outnumbered; the total population of the city of Valyria and the small area of farmland under its authority was at least twenty times lower than the corresponding population of the cities of the anti-Valyrian coalition and their surrounding farmland.  
  
The Valyrians, of course, responded by sending dragons.  
  
Baelor Adraesal—until recently a Lord of Valyria under King Valys but now a Lord Freeholder of Valyria, titled thus to signify his undying allegiance to the rebellion against the tyranny of kings—led a host of thirty-four dragonriders against the combined host of the kings. The resulting battle would go down in history as the Day of Wrath, the first major battle of dragonriders against dragonless men. Well over a thousand men were slain by the fiery anger of the Valyrians, in their fierce determination that they would never again be forced to serve a king.  
  
If the kings of the peninsula had felt less acutely threatened by the existence of the new government in Valyria, the war could have ended then. However, in a meeting between the kings of the cities that had fought the Valyrians, Gaegon VI of House Camonylarr, the king of the city of Jaeria, a large city about two-hundred miles from Valyria, gave a great rousing speech to his fellow kings, reminding them of the great threat posed to their own positions by the Valyrian uprising, declaring that if the Valyrians were victorious they would all be killed either by the Valyrians themselves or by the Great Shepherd's divine retribution, and denouncing the Valyrians as monstrous heathens who had gone against the natural order of the world. The speech was a great success, and the other kings of the southern part of the peninsula rallied to his cause, and they agreed with him that the Valyrian Freehold must be defeated and the city of Valyria destroyed, no matter what the cost.  
  
The Valyrians expected the war to end after the Day of Wrath. Envoys were given seals of authority by the newly chosen Council of Four-Thousand—inadvertently setting a precedent that would last for thousands of years, giving the Council of Four-Thousand, not the Council of Forty, precedence in matters of external diplomacy—and were sent to all eleven of the cities against which the Valyrians were at war. At the advice of Lanor II of House Maedarys, the king of the city of Enos, the kings agreed on a shared response. Each envoy was sent back in fourteen pieces, mocking the Valyrians' gods, on the grounds that only a king could deputise an envoy, so the men who had been sent by the Valyrians were just foreigners guilty of trespassing on their lands in a time of war.  
  
At this, Aenys Nomoryen, one of the legendary orators of the early Freehold, originally a baker who had become a rebel leader against King Valys the Foul, is said to have remarked: “Then it will be war unto the knife.” (This is believed to be the first usage of that phrase.) There could be no peace now. The war would end when one side or the other ended.  
  
It would be called the Long War.


	6. The Long War

The dragonriders were prepared to roast any great host that invaded their lands. No such host was forthcoming. The coalition of kings had learnt a lesson from the Day of Wrath that would be learnt time and time again, over the years, by powers that were fighting the Valyrians and had not fought them before: it was madness to confront the Valyrian Freehold in an open field. When fighting men, gathering large numbers of men in one place was a good thing, as it prevented them from being small groups to be defeated in detail, one by one, by a larger force. When fighting dragons, that was not true. A big army meant a big target.  
  
Instead, the cities opposed to the Valyrians took advantage of their still greatly superior numbers—though not as extremely superior as before—in a manner that did not play so thoroughly to the Valyrians' advantages. They raided the farmlands, towns and villages that surrounded the city of Valyria. The raids were always quick; small groups of armed men would rape, pillage and burn a village or two and then retreat back over the border and hide among the general population. By the time any dragons were sent from the city of Valyria to burn them, they were long gone.  
  
Upon failing to stop these armed men with its dragonriders, the Valyrian Freehold decided to strike at the source. Dragonriders were sent to the cities that had declared war on Valyria. However, the kings had already left their cities and were hiding in the lands sworn to them, and the Council of Four-Thousand, consisting of ordinary cityfolk, were unwilling to have the dragonriders burn down the ordinary folk of other cities. So this proved ineffective.  
  
The Valyrians soon realised that dragon power alone was insufficient to deal with these raids. They needed an army. Moreover, to cover so much of their territory from so many enemies, they needed a large army. Now the newborn Valyrian Freehold found one of its strengths, a power that the kings' cities did not have.  
  
As the city was ruled by its people, their government commanded their confidence and loyalty to an extent that the kings of their enemies could never match. Sensing the deadly threat to their newly won freedom, the men of Valyria, of many occupations, flocked to arms in massive numbers. This was not a small army maintained at an autocrat's expense to preserve the power of an autocrat; it was an army of the people, raised to arms in order to defend themselves. The Council of Four-Thousand appointed a committee from among its members to oversee handing out weapons, training this army and establishing a viable chain of command, and the army came to defend the outlying lands around the city from the ravagers.  
  
The armies serving the kings, who were hiding in countryside rather than their grand palaces in the cities over which they ruled for fear of dragons' wrath, still outnumbered the volunteer army of the Freehold, but by a lesser degree than before. Their soldiers could not gather in large groups or else they would attract the eyes of dragonriders above, and the Valyrians had to disperse their own army to protect hundreds of square miles of farmland, towns and villages. What ensued was a war of skirmishes, where it was rare in the extreme for either side to amass more than a hundred men-at-arms in one place at a time, and fairly rare to amass more than a few dozen.  
  
This war tired and irritated the cityfolk of Valyria. As the city was now ruled by a body whose Councillors were chosen by the city's freeholders—every man born in the city of Valyria—Valyria would easily have consented to a peace, if the kings had desired one After a few years of a tiresome war that seemed without end, the Valyrian people would certainly have accepted a peace whereby the kings could continue to rule their cities as long as they, in the city of Valyria, could rule themselves… but they would not allow the loss of their newly won freedom. However, if the kings of the cities of the coalition had wanted to make peace, they would have done so after the Day of Wrath. They saw the existence of the Valyrian Freehold as an intolerable threat and were willing to endure the harshness of the war in order to eradicate it.  
  
So the Long War raged on.  
  
The Valyrians attempted to end the raids by taking over the administration of the cities that were opposing them, as the kings were hiding out of the cities. This proved to be easier said than done. If a dragonrider flew over one of the cities, they would bow and scrape, for fear of another Day of Wrath, and new officials would arise from among the people and pledge friendship to the free people of Valyria and intend to begin to govern themselves… and as soon as the dragonrider went away, the king's guards hiding among the cityfolk would emerge from their hiding places, butcher those of their fellow cityfolk who wanted to end the war with creatively horrible deaths, butcher any Valyrian soldiers left behind, sometimes even butcher anyone who had merely _spoken_ to the dragonrider, and resume as before. And if a dragonrider stayed in an enemy city, or the farmland, towns and villages surrounding an enemy city, overnight, he would die. A dragon was mighty, but dragons and their riders needed sleep, and, when sleeping, they were vulnerable. This shocked the Valyrians the first time it happened. They lost more than a dozen dragonriders to this method over the course of the Long War.  
  
Early in the Long War, the idealistic Valyrians tried to institute choosings in the eleven cities that had once belonged to the kings who had gone to war to overthrow Valyrian democracy, so that the common people of these other cities could govern themselves and become democracies just like Valyria itself. This did not turn out to work. The people had lost many of their menfolk to the Long War, especially the Day of Wrath, even though it was a war that their cities, not Valyria, had started, so they were easily stirred up into mistrust, hatred and suspicion of the Valyrians and thus the choosings. Moreover, in each of the eleven cities, there were still many men loyal to the king hiding in the city, especially men who were rich or noble and preferred the rule of kings to the idea of letting the common people rule, and these men were generally likelier to be well-armed than the poor. They hired men to intimidate anybody who wanted to vote. The result was that extremely low numbers of people turned out to vote. Sometimes it would be so low that there were fewer people voting than the number of assemblymen they were supposed to be voting for, so many seats could not be filled at all. And whenever the Valyrians left, anybody who had been chosen by their fellow-cityfolk would be murdered by the hired men of the nobility. After decades of attempting and failing at this, the dejected Valyrians gave up trying to bring democracy at spearpoint.  
  
It is difficult to assign any firm dates to events in the Valyrian peninsula in this period. The Valyrians and the other peoples of the area were far from the heights of civilisation that they would later achieve, as the greatest power in the world. They did not have magics of blood and fire; those would be developed much later in history. They did not have their far-famed magical materials, dragonstone and Valyrian steel. They did not even have ordinary steel, for they did not have iron at all; they had to use wood, stone and bronze. All written records of the Long War were penned by Valyrian scholars more than a thousand years after it ended. The later Valyrians kept meticulous records, but in these early years, what is known is dependent on word of mouth, passed down by elder generations to the generation that finally started to write down histories. As a result, the records of this era are much less detailed than the records of later eras of the Valyrian Freehold, when details could be recorded in writing, and so the timing of events is difficult to determine. All these things are inexact. That said, from those records that do exist, it seems reasonably clear that this period of skirmishing war lasted for several hundred years—one of the longest continuing wars in history, though surpassed by the Thousand Years' War in the North of Westeros. The length of the Long War is believed to be due to the two opposing disparities of force: the dragonriders of Valyria which the other cities could not match, and the numbers of the men of the other cities which far exceeded those of the Valyrians. As a result, it was very difficult for either side to achieve ultimate victory over the other.  
  
Eventually, after years of trial and error, the Valyrians came upon the best solution that could be found: dragonriders would venture out, with each one escorted by a few dozen men. That was little enough that it would not deprive the city of too many men for protecting its lands, but many enough that it would suffice to protect the dragonrider from being murdered in his sleep. Such dragonriders and their escorts would travel to an enemy city and occupy it. The Valyrian men were there to protect the dragonriders, who were vulnerable in their sleep and were necessary to maintain rule over the city, for the Valyrians did not have anywhere near the strength in numbers to occupy those cities with armies alone. Rule over the cities would be done by local people, not the kings who had fled from their cities and who were orchestrating the war against Valyria.  
  
As years passed and turned to decades and decades passed and turned to centuries, lands formerly belonging to the eleven cities that had attacked Valyria slowly fell under Valyrian administration, as well as the lands that had belonged to the city of Valyria since before the Kingdom's fall and the Freehold's rise. The raiders who were raping, pillaging and burning their way across the lands around Valyria had no hesitation in extending their activities to these lands too. The Day of Wrath had been centuries ago. These men were not former soldiers taking up irregular warfare. The time of regular warfare was long-past. They were raiders now, men who had never been soldiers, whose grandfathers had never been soldiers, who had only been raiders for generations. Despite bitter memories of the Day of Wrath, the raiders slowly lost the allegiance of the people, for the brutality of their conduct against the people compared to the relatively kind treatment of the Valyrian democrats. The people of the other cities grew tired of dying to help their kings fight Valyria. These raiders and the kings who commanded them were ever-so-slowly tracked down and destroyed, and peace returned to the land. The Long War did not end in a dramatic final confrontation; its last decade was less intense than the second-last, which was less intense than the third-last decade, and so on, and eventually the last raider-bands were extinguished and the war faded away.  
  
By the end of the Long War, all eleven of the cities that had gone to war against Valyria to preserve and enforce the institution of monarchy were no longer monarchies. Their nobilities and monarchies had been dismantled. But they were not ruled by assemblies like the Council of Four-Thousand in Valyria, appointed by choosings whereby every man born in the city had a vote, like Valyria itself. The Valyrians had tried to bring this democratic system to them, early in the Long War, but had been greeted only with hostility and failure. So the Valyrians gave up trying to make new freeholds of the cities that had gone to war against them, and instead they simply governed those cities themselves. These cities were now governed by officials appointed from Valyria and paid tribute to Valyria, but the tribute was quite low, and they had the rule of law in an impartial manner, rather than codes of law that gave huge privileges to the nobility and none to the common people. In times of war, they were not conscripted, but they had no armies of their own, and men had the option of joining the Valyrian army. Many did. As the city of Valyria was the centre of this small civilisation, ambitious men from the other cities that were subject to Valyria would often head to Valyria, so that, even though they were not freeholders, their sons would be born in Valyria and would therefore be freeholders. And so the city grew.  
  
The eleven kings who had gone to war against Valyria could have chosen peace, and if they had, they would have been left to their own devices. They had gone to war in order to end the Freehold and restore the rule of kings. Instead, they had caused the deposition of their own royal Houses and the absorption of their cities into a new empire.  
  
However, the expense of the Long War had been almost beyond imagination. The land had been wrecked; the damage was immense. Over the years, tens of thousands of men had been slain—a horrific blow in what was still quite a primitive society with low population density. Enormous amounts of money had been spent fighting and killing. The recovery, known as the Long Peace, would also take centuries.

Moreover, the Valyrians were not without enemies; and their new foes would be uncountably more dangerous than the coalition of eleven kings ever were.

For the city of Valyria had only united the southern part of what would later be called the Valyrian peninsula. The central part of the peninsula had fallen under the rule of a different city, named Tyria, and the northern part, yet another city, named Oros. Tyria and Oros had conducted their conquests by much more conventional means than Valyria. They had no dragonriders. They had been among the larger cities in the regions they would later assume power in, unlike Valyria which had been quite small. While the southern part of the peninsula was busy with the Long War and then the Long Peace, the central and northern parts had various much shorter wars between cities, which sometimes ended with the conquest of one city by another but usually merely adjusted the balance of power between cities, with one city taking some of the farmland, towns and villages that had previously belonged to another. Over hundreds of years, the number of independent cities had fallen and Tyria and Oros had risen to prominence, without any grand war of every other city in the region against a single city, such as had been faced by Valyria.  
  
They were also different in a much more dangerous way. Tyria and Oros were ruled by kings.  
  
The Tyrians and the Orosi saw what had happened to those cities that had made war upon Valyria, and the Day of Wrath had taught everyone in the peninsula how dangerous dragons could be. They were much more powerful than any of those cities, but Valyria too was much more powerful than it had once been, as it had secured the allegiance of the eleven cities that had once made war upon it and now ruled an empire larger than the Tyrian and Orosi empires, though not larger than both of them put together, so Valyria's manpower was much less restricted than before. Moreover, the Valyrian empire was richer than the Tyrian empire or the Orosi empire, in spite of the centuries of the Long War, for it had just experienced centuries of the Long Peace while they had been busy with occasional wars between different cities in those regions. So they did not attack. They did, however, remain in a state of low-level hostility towards the Valyrian Freehold, whose form of government was greatly disliked by their kings, and disliked them in turn. All expected a war to come.


	7. The Ghiscari Yoke

The three cities endured in an uneasy equilibrium for about fifty years after Tyria and Oros finished defeating their rivals and conquering their respective parts of the peninsula. Some chroniclers call this period the Peace of the Hilt, an evocative image suggesting that the three cities each held a hand on the hilt of a sword, though it is usually considered merely a part of the Long Peace. That equilibrium was shattered by an outside power.

The Empire of Ghis was the mightiest empire in the world at the time, with the possible exception of Yi Ti. It remains infamous even now, for the Empire of Ghis had a ratio of slaves to free men higher than any other known civilisation before or since, a darkly impressive achievement in human history. Its dreaded lockstep legions were highly disciplined and utterly obedient, and their spears and shields were the terror of Essos. Ghis was founded at least one and a half thousand years before Valyria; the uncertainty is in the founding of Valyria, not the founding of Ghis, for the Ghiscari were writing great poems and histories at a time when nobody in the Valyrian peninsula had any idea of what 'letters' were. Over many centuries, the Ghiscari expanded their power, defeating other civilisations and enslaving their people. Their empire grew to be far larger than any other state nearby, and they were ever-greedy to expand further, for they treated their slaves so cruelly that the death rate was so high that their slave population was always falling, so they needed new conquests or else they would run out of slaves. The city of Ghis itself lay in the far southeast of the Gulf of Grief, but over many years, its control crept northward and then westward. By the time the Peace of the Hilt ended, they ruled all of the lands on the Gulf of Grief except its southwestern part: a peninsula that would later be known as the Valyrian peninsula.

The First Ghiscari War began with a ferocious assault by the lockstep legions on the empire of Oros, which was the northernmost of the three great city-states of the Valyrian peninsula. The Orosi fought with valour, but they were both outnumbered and outclassed. The Empire of Ghis was several times larger and many times more populous than the entire Valyrian peninsula. Moreover, the Ghiscari wielded weapons of steel, whereas the Orosi, like the Tyrians and Valyrians, had only stone and bronze, and the relatively disorganised soldiers of Oros had no counter to the highly disciplined spear-and-shield formations of the Ghiscari lockstep legions. The Orosi were defeated, and their lands were devoured by the Empire of Ghis. The Tyrians tried to strike a bargain with the Empire of Ghis whereby they would help the Ghiscari to fight their old Orosi rivals in exchange for a share of the spoils. The Ghiscari contemptuously refused, then conquered Tyria and its empire as well.

Valyria had not gone to war on behalf of Oros and Tyria. There was no friendship between those cities, though they were near to each other. They had spent the years of the Peace of the Hilt waiting for a war between them, which would probably have happened if not for the Ghiscari invasion. Valyria did not take sides between Oros, Tyria and Ghis; as far as the Valyrian people were concerned, they would leave alone anyone who was willing to leave them alone. The Valyrians had no quarrel with the Ghiscari… but the Ghiscari saw their lands, and lusted.

The Tyrians and Orosi had a healthy understanding of the power of dragonfire. Wild dragons still roamed all over the Valyrian peninsula, and were an endless menace to flocks (for the people of the peninsula were still, by and large, shepherds). They would not be finally eradicated until more than two-thousand years after the end of the Ghiscari Wars, for they greatly outnumbered the tamed dragons at the time. The Ghiscari, however, had no fear of dragons, and, expecting an easy victory, they invaded the lands of the Valyrian Freehold.

The lockstep legions outnumbered the largest army that Valyria could possibly muster by a factor of dozens. The Valyrians were not expecting an invasion. They had not fought a war since the end of the Long War a very long time ago, perhaps as much as half a millennium. Soon, many thousands of Ghiscari soldiers were driving deep into the lands of Valyria, easily crushing the small peacetime garrisons of Valyrian soldiers and the militias of local people that sprang up to resist them.

The Council of Four-Thousand rapidly issued a call to arms, and the men of the city and its lands flocked to the dragon banners. It frantically ordered the Council of Forty to do something, and so Lords Freeholder Aelyx Dañonal, Rhaenor Caranion, Gaemon Lantaeris, Viserys Celaenon, Valarr Qaegal and Daeron Hadrerys were commanded with leading groups of dragonriders to immediately respond to the Ghiscari threat. Each led a dozen dragonriders; for though dragons bred slowly, they did breed, and in the years of the Long Peace the number of dragonriders available to the Valyrian Freehold had increased.

What ensued would make the Day of Wrath look like a child playing with a candle.

Day after day, army after army disappeared in dragonflame. The lockstep legions were superbly disciplined. No Valyrian army was their equal. Yet they could not possibly withstand the fury of the coloured fire from above. They tried using stonethrowers and scorpions to slay the dragons. They did not succeed in slaying a single one. It was immensely difficult to hit such a swiftly moving target with a relatively slow and cumbersome device, and even if they did, the blow would not be able to kill the dragon unless they were so incredibly, unbelievably, almost impossibly lucky as to hit an eye. And not even Ghiscari iron discipline was strong enough to prevent the slave soldiers from fleeing when faced with the spectre of being burnt alive.

Amidst this terrible rain of death from the skies, the commanders of the lockstep legions ordered them to split apart into smaller groups, so that they would present smaller targets. These smaller groups were hunted down by Valyrian soldiers and by the dragonriders roaming the air.

After less than half a year of fighting, both sides agreed to a peace. The Ghiscari were bemused and horrified at the hideous losses they had taken while fighting such a small and primitive civilisation. The Valyrians, meanwhile, were utterly exhausted. Even after the fiery wrath of the dragonriders slew so many of the men of the lockstep legions and forced them to disperse, the Ghiscari soldiers in Valyrian lands still outnumbered the soldiers of the Valyrian Freehold. Dragons had helped a lot, but they were much less efficient at hunting small groups than large ones, because there were not enough of them, so the Valyrian army had taken huge losses (by its standards; minor losses by the standards of the Empire of Ghis) hunting down the groups of Ghiscari men who had still been invading Valyria after the fury of the dragons forced them to split up their large hosts. Moreover, the Ghiscari had advanced more than a hundred miles into Valyrian lands before the invasion was properly halted by the dragons' wrath. That meant they had occupied a not-inconsiderable fraction of Valyria's territory. In that time, thousands of Valyrians—not the people in the city itself, but the people of the surrounding towns, villages, farmland and eleven other cities that were ruled from Valyria, for by now they too considered themselves Valyrian—had been either killed or abducted and sold into slavery. A large fraction of Valyria's population had been enslaved.

Both Valyria and Ghis would consider the First Ghiscari War to be a victory—the Ghiscari because they had conquered a large amount of land and gained a lot of slaves, and the Valyrians simply because they had survived—but both suffered a very great deal indeed.

Both sides also knew this peace was likely to be temporary.


	8. Valyria's Revival

Over the years of this peace, thousands of daring Tyrians, and even some Orosi who had had to go much further, were able to escape from the slavers who had overrun their country into Valyrian lands, whereupon they became promptly free. The Valyrians, who had lost thousands of people in the war, needed them and accepted them. This greatly irritated the Ghiscari. The Tyrians and Orosi were of very similar ethnicity to the Valyrians, as all of them were the descendants of the wandering peoples who had migrated to the Valyrian peninsula from the lands of the Lhazarene. As it was the power of dragons that prevented them from being doomed to enslavement, they were easily converted from the faith of the Great Shepherd to the faith of the Fourteen Flames. Due to their shared ethnicity, compared to the greatly different Ghiscari, and the fact that all of them had suffered at Ghiscari hands, the Valyrians came to have a lot of sympathy for the Tyrians and Orosi who were living under Ghiscari oppression. Some of these Tyrians and Orosi migrated to the city of Valyria, so their children born in the city became freeholders, and some of those children rose up to be influential men. This produced a powerful war lobby in Valyrian society, demanding the reclamation of the rest of the peninsula from the Ghiscari conquerors. There were, of course, also many native Valyrians who had lost close friends, family or both in the First Ghiscari War and who hated Ghis with a passion, so this faction did not consist solely of the descendants of refugees. Nonetheless, a notable proportion of the men in this faction had some ancestry from Tyria and Oros, not only Valyria, so they felt the need to strongly associate themselves with Valyrian patriotism, in order to avoid any political disadvantage that might arise from their different roots; and so they took upon themselves the symbol of a dragon. This political faction would last for thousands of years, until the Doom itself, known as 'the dragons'.  
  
The dragons were not the only political faction in Valyria, and other factions, which noted the great damage that had been done to Valyria by the First Ghiscari War, preferred peace, and these factions collectively outnumbered the dragons. Eventually, however, they would not get the choice. Some period of time after the end of the First Ghiscari War (some say thirty years, some say three-hundred), the Empire of Ghis sent the Valyrian Freehold an ultimatum, demanding that the Valyrians must stop permitting Tyrian, Orosi and Valyrian slaves who had escaped from Ghiscari lands to settle in Valyrian lands. The Valyrians refused. That meant war.  
  
In the Second Ghiscari War, both sides were readier than in the First. The Valyrians were prepared to face an invasion; there were already thousands of men-at-arms at the border which had once been between the empires of the two cities of Valyria and Tyria. The Ghiscari were prepared to face dragonriders; the lockstep legions were dispatched in small companies, presenting no great target for the dragonriders to destroy. And the Ghiscari slave soldiers greatly outnumbered the free Valyrians.  
  
However, both sides would be taken aback by an event that neither had expected; for a third power entered the war.  
  
The Tall Men of Sarnor were divided between many rulers, as the Valyrian peninsula had been before the Long War. The Empire of Ghis had long been pressing against their borders and seeking to enslave them. The Valyrians did not have the faintest notion that the Sarnori even existed, but the Sarnori were a larger and more cosmopolitan civilisation, who traded with many folk across Essos, and they had heard tales of the mysterious people of the far south who rode great flying beasts that breathed fire, who had defied the Ghiscari and lived. This gave them hope. The Sarnori did not wish the Ghiscari to eliminate this threat, and they noticed that the number of Ghiscari troops on their own frontier had shrunk. And so the Sarnori kings consulted with each other, and they elevated one of their own to rule over them, one who claimed descent from the mythical Sarnori hero Huzhor Amai. He was the first High King of Sarnor.  
  
The Ghiscari were shocked and horrified when the Tall Men united themselves and launched a great invasion of their empire at the worst possible time. Huge numbers of their troops had to be withdrawn from the Valyrian peninsula in order to defend their own lands from the invaders from the north. The Valyrians learnt from Ghiscari prisoners what had happened. They could not contact the Sarnori, for the Empire of Ghis lay in the way, and not even a dragonrider could go so far, for the dragon would need to rest and it was too risky to leave a dragon asleep in Ghiscari territory without a company of armed men to protect the dragon. Nevertheless they took heart. The Sarnori had given them hope.  
  
The Sarnori attack greatly improved Valyria's prospects in the war. The Ghiscari soldiers on the Valyrian front still outnumbered the soldiers of Valyria, but not by such a large factor any more. Now the Valyrian soldiers, arranged in small groups, were better able to confront the Ghiscari soldiers, also arranged in small groups. Dragons were, of course, useful. They flew over the land, and though they could not destroy thousands of foes at a time due to the dispersion of their enemies, they could still slay many, over the course of many days. Moreover, as a matter that neither the Valyrians nor the Ghiscari had foreseen, the dragons worked unexpectedly well in conjunction with another advantage on the Valyrian side: slave revolts. A horrifically large proportion—more than two thirds—of the people of the conquered Orosi and Tyrian lands had been taken away from the Valyrian peninsula and sold to owners elsewhere in the Empire of Ghis, but a significant proportion still remained in their old homeland. The Tyrians and Orosi had not been under the yoke, driving them to hopelessness, for as long as most of the slave populations had been. Many of them took up arms, seeking their freedom. They generally did not have many weapons, only whatever they could scavenge, and most had no military training or experience or discipline. Terribly many of them were slain. But some were not, and these people proved to be a menace for Ghiscari soldiers wandering the area in small numbers. To a large army they would have been no threat, but the Ghiscari soldiers could not organise themselves in large armies for fear of dragonflame. Thus the dragons and the revolting slaves formed a two-pronged assault that left no safe option.  
  
With the aid of this friendly population in enemy lands as well as the power of their dragons, the Valyrians advanced, despite their armies being outnumbered by the armies of the Empire of Ghis. The Ghiscari fought back with the discipline that they were famed for, and so the Second Ghiscari War lasted for several years, much longer than the First. But Ghis could not defeat the Sarnori and the Valyrians at the same time. When the war ended, the Empire of Ghis had shrunk on both fronts. On the Sarnori front, in less than a decade the Ghiscari lost lands that they had taken from the disunited Tall Men by years of aggression over the course of centuries. On the Valyrian front, the lands that formerly belonged to Tyria and Oros had been reclaimed by the armies that fought under the dragon banner. Henceforth, until the Doom, this peninsula was united under the rule of Valyria.


	9. Valyria's Revenge

By the end of the Second Ghiscari War, the lands that had belonged to Valyria ever since the Long War were in good condition, but the lands of Tyria and Oros were in a horrific state. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Tyrians and Orosi had been taken far away and would never see the Valyrian peninsula again. Other slaves from elsewhere in the Empire of Ghis had replaced them, as the Ghiscari sought to prevent any sense of identity and special purpose from arising in their slaves by dispersing their slaves across their empire, so that no area would be home to a dangerously large population of slaves who could speak to each other and understand each other in any tongue except the language of Ghis. After so many years of enslavement for generation after generation, most of the slaves in the Empire of Ghis spoke only the language of Ghis. They essentially _were_ Ghiscari now, not of the foreign nationalities that the Ghiscari had subjugated long ago; they were kept as slaves anyway. And Ghis refused to do any trade with Valyria to return its missing people in exchange for Ghiscari people captured in the war, fearing that any confiscation of slaves, even if compensated, would encourage the sentiment among previously quiescent slaves in Ghiscari heartlands that it was possible for them to be free.  
  
After two bloody wars against the Ghiscari, the people of the Valyrian peninsula hated them with a passion, especially the newly liberated Tyrians and Orosi. (They were now ruled by officials appointed from the city of Valyria, just like the lands that had been Valyrian ever since the Long War, indeed also like the lands that had been Valyrian ever since the founding of the Kingdom of Valyria; but they were no longer slaves.) Money poured from the richer lands in the southern part of the peninsula to rebuild the devastated central and northern parts. The Valyrians knew that the Ghiscari would doubtless come back and seek to avenge their loss; they could not afford to be stingy with the rebuilding of their people. Nevertheless, those lands were critically denuded of labour by the mass enslavement and abduction of their native populations. Some people from the southern part of the Valyrian peninsula moved to the central and northern parts, as there was now a much lower population density there and they wanted the available land, but most stayed, not wanting to move to an impoverished, wartorn place. This was not enough.  
  
So strong was their hatred of the Ghiscari, and so horrendous was the devastation of the lands of Tyria and Oros, that the Valyrians decided to use the Ghiscari captured in the war as slave labour to help rebuild their wrecked homeland. This was made legal by a resolution of the Council of Four-Thousand for the soldiers of the lockstep legions, who were utterly despised for what they had done. Shortly afterwards, the Council of Four-Thousand passed another law, legalising the enslavement of the Ghiscari civilians (freeborn and enslaved alike) who had come into the Valyrian peninsula during the occupation.  
  
The mass enslavement of the Ghiscari who had come to the Valyrian peninsula enabled the rebuilding of the lands of Tyria and Oros from the damage done to them by Ghis. The Tyrian and Orosi people felt a great deal of solidarity with the Valyrians for liberating them, and they were already of very similar ethnicity and spoke very similar tongues. Most of them proved willing to convert to the religion of the Fourteen Flames, and, in addition to considering themselves as Tyrians and Orosi, they came to think of themselves as Valyrians.  
  
The first slaves in the Valyrian peninsula were people of the nation that had enslaved hundreds of thousands of Valyrians.  
  
In many cases, the Valyrians who were now masters had, until recently, been slaves of the Ghiscari; and Ghiscari law and culture did not allow slaves to have any rights at all, and actively encouraged arbitrary punishment to keep them terrified of their masters. As a result, it should not be a surprise that the Ghiscari slaves were not treated kindly. Most became labourers in farmland vacated due to the abduction and enslavement of its original inhabitants by the Ghiscari during the occupation, or workers rebuilding destroyed cities and towns. Some, however, were given a particularly cruel fate: mining under the Fourteen Flames. Mine slaves had the lowest life-expectancy of any slaves in the Valyrian peninsula.  
  
Even with all the damage done to them, Tyria and Oros were such large cities that they remained distinct entities to a greater extent than any other city or piece of land under Valyrian control at the time. Some considered their political association with Valyria as a pact of three cities. Nonetheless, they were governed by officials appointed by the Council of Four-Thousand, and they and their lands are generally considered to have been part of the Valyrian Freehold ever since the Second Ghiscari War.

 

The next war between the Empire of Ghis and the Valyrian Freehold was not started by either the Ghiscari or the Valyrians. It was started by the Tall Men of Sarnor. The High King at the time was the second king of a new dynasty that had only just risen to power in the capital, Sarnath, due to a vicious civil war. He sought to consolidate the power of the dynasty his uncle had established and to unite his people with a great victory over the Ghiscari, the old enemy that had taken lands from the Sarnori for so long. The Valyrians dared not risk the defeat of the Sarnori, lest the Ghiscari be able to turn their full strength against the Valyrian peninsula without any other foe, so they renewed their old alliance with Sarnor and declared war on Ghis.  
  
Records are unclear on the exact amount of time between the Second and Third Ghiscari Wars, but judging by the significantly greater number of dragons who fought in the Third Ghiscari War, it is guessed to have been at least a few centuries. Before their extinction in the Doom, dragons lived long, but they did not overrun the world; they bred very slowly. By this time the Valyrians had learnt much from the formerly-Ghiscari-occupied lands that they had overrun. Most sources concur that they used weapons of steel in the Third Ghiscari War, though they still had not yet learnt how to make dragonstone and Valyrian steel, and by then they had learnt how to write, though the practice was not yet common and they had not yet started to record detailed histories. They had also learnt how to build larger and sturdier buildings, though not yet structures of anywhere near the magnificence of the pyramids of Ghis.  
  
The lockstep legions fought as well as they always did, but that was not enough to prevail. The High Kingdom of Sarnor and the Valyrian Freehold were much stronger than they had been in the Second Ghiscari War. The Empire of Ghis was not. Both sides, now, enslaved any enemy soldiers or civilians they captured, which provided a strong disincentive to surrender. The war saw a large slice of Ghis's northern frontierlands fall to the Sarnori, while the Valyrians conquered the part of the Essosi mainland that lay to the north of the Valyrian peninsula and then spread even further, as far as the city of Bhorash, which became a blackened ruin after it defied an army led by the dragonrider Aemon Qrilerys. By the end of the Third Ghiscari War, the lands on the western half of the Gulf of Grief belonged no longer to the Ghiscari whose intensive slaving had given it that name, but to the Valyrians. Compared to how it stood at the height of its power, between the First and Second Ghiscari Wars, the Empire of Ghis was about half its size.


	10. From Freehold to Slaver-Empire

The Third Ghiscari War added a vast new southmarch to Sarnor, entrenched the power of the current High King and ended any chance of restoring the previous dynasty to the throne in Sarnath. Its effect on Valyria was more profound. The Valyrian Freehold was more than doubled in size, conquering the Lands of the Long Summer and a great part of the Painted Mountains and the lands to the south of them. Valyrian ships, not Ghiscari ones, assumed a dominant position in the Summer Sea, which brought plenty of trade, and thus knowledge of faraway places in the outside world, to Valyria. Most significant of all, though, were the truly colossal numbers of Ghiscari who now became slaves. Most of them had already been slaves, due to the extreme ratio of slaves to free people in Ghiscari civilisation, but nevertheless this represented a huge glut of slaves, to an extent that the Valyrian Freehold had never known before. The price of slaves dropped like a stone. Slaves flooded the markets, and there were enormous expanses of good new lands to be bought and settled by Valyrians, who used slaves to work for them. This gave lots of Valyrians more land than they could ever have dreamt of owning otherwise, and sent money flooding into the treasury of the Valyrian state. This sale of land conquered by the state to private individuals did not merely pay for the cost of the war; it did more than that; due to this sale and the taxes earned from the settlers, the Valyrian state actually earned more as a result of the war than all the costs of raising and paying and feeding armies. Mass enslavement and colonisation turned war into a source of profit.  
  
The lower slave price also made it economical for ordinary Valyrians to buy slaves to work in their homes, enabling them to devote their time to other matters. This greatly improved the ease, leisure and quality of life of the average Valyrian man and woman, at the price of perpetuating a system of horror and misery for the slaves. It is after the Third Ghiscari War that the mining beneath the Fourteen Flames—a task so foul that free men would never consent to it—truly took off.  
  
Before the Third Ghiscari War, slavery was a temporary pastime of Valyrian civilisation that was used to repair the damage of the Ghiscari occupation. The slave population inherited from the Second Ghiscari War was perpetually declining to assume an ever-less significant role in society. After the Third Ghiscari War, slavery became an intrinsic part of Valyrian civilisation, a part which brought so many advantages to Valyrians that its abolition, once seemingly very possible, receded out of the realm of possibility.  
  
And as slavery brought all these advantages, there arose voices in Valyrian politics who wanted more of it. The dragons turned from a force for the liberation of lost Valyrian lands to a force for violent expansion into other people's lands.  
  
In the proceeding centuries, the Valyrian Freehold fought two more wars against the Empire of Ghis: the Fourth and Fifth Ghiscari Wars. Both of them were, purely and simply, wars of aggression, started by Valyria in order to acquire more land for Valyrian settlers and more slaves for the markets. In the Fourth Ghiscari War, Ghis lost three fifths of the land it had left, even though the Tall Men did not all fight on the Valyrian side, for the High King's power had waned a great deal and the power of the lower Sarnori kings had waxed, so now Sarnor was more like a confederation of loosely tied states than a single state. In the Fourth Ghiscari War, some Sarnori kings fought on the side of Valyria and some fought on the side of Ghis. It was a few decades after the Fourth Ghiscari War that the formal discipline of history first took root in Valyria, and Valyrians started writing down events for the first time; as a result, records of the Fifth Ghiscari War are much more detailed and comprehensive than records of the previous four. That final conflict, between 4582 and 4579 BVD, brought the utter and total destruction of the Empire of Ghis, the oldest state in the world. The last of the Ghiscari people were sold into slavery, their monuments and temples were despoiled, and their great cities were taken from them or burnt to the ground. Any slaves who looked like they might have ancestry from the Valyrian peninsula were freed and granted allotments of land to settle in, for the Valyrians still remembered the people they had lost in the First Ghiscari War, but the majority of the slaves in the defeated Empire of Ghis remained as slaves. The city of Ghis itself suffered an especially hideous fate. Even after it was ravaged by dragonflame, the burnt-out shells of its buildings were torn down brick by brick and the surrounding lands were sowed by salt and sulphur, so that the mighty civilisation that had enslaved Valyrians would never rise again. It was Valyria's final, conclusive vengeance.  
  
Valyria was left with a sprawling empire, not as large as the Empire of Ghis at its height, but still huge. In time its enormity would exceed Ghis's wildest dreams. The downfall of Ghiscari civilisation gave the Valyrians plenty of land to settle and a huge glut of slaves, which would last them for thousands of years, especially as they came to treat their slaves somewhat less cruelly, not out of any kindness but simply to stop the rapid decline of the slave population. Slavery was now detached from any emotive, romantic sentiment of vengeance for the cruelty that the Ghiscari had inflicted upon their own ancestors. Now it was simply business; and slaves were valuable. Slavery for vengeance could perhaps have ended once vengeful urges had been satisfied. Slavery for business would not end for millennia, until Valyria met its Doom.  
  
In time Valyria would come into conflict with the Sarnori, its former allies, and later with the Rhoynar. The lockstep legions of Ghis, once utterly dreaded, proved to be a pale shadow of the terror that a far more powerful slaver-empire could inflict upon a horrified world. The Ghiscari people, unlike the people of Tyria and Oros who were culturally very similar to the Valyrians, would never be considered Valyrians, even a hundred generations later when they had forgotten the Ghiscari tongue and spoke only derivatives of High Valyrian. Some would be freed by individuals, but the majority of the Ghiscari people, whose ancestors once ruled the world's great slave-power, would be forced to serve as slaves.  
  
Moreover, the expansion of Valyrian power, to rule a gigantic empire, had ruinous effects on Valyrian democracy. Valyria could not possibly have made such vast conquests so quickly if not for the power of its dragons, and the dragonriders were needed in order to keep the huge population of Ghiscari, and later others too, as the terrified subjects of the much smaller population of the Valyrian peninsula. This gave the dragonriders a great deal of power. Also, the glut in slaves and lands at times of great conquests primarily benefited those who were already rich, as they could buy lots of slaves and lands when they were cheap and then profit immensely from them when they were expensive. Thus, inequality in Valyrian society blossomed as a result of these conquests, though the conquests brought so much wealth to the city that the wealth of poor Valyrians was rising a great deal (though nowhere near as fast as the wealth of the rich) so the people of the city were content. The Council of Forty that ruled the families of dragonriders, once a much weaker institution than the democratic Council of Four-Thousand, rose in power, rivalling the latter. Slavery, expansion and war were making the Valyrian people rich, but eroding their hard-won liberty.  
  
Thus the Valyrian Freehold turned from a small, idealistic city-state, born out of a revolution of common people against tyranny, into a mighty tyranny itself, the greatest slaver-empire the world had ever seen. It was a power that would have horrified its founders, but it was a power too terrible to resist.  
  
Wealth flowed into the city of Valyria, and so did power, for it was the only place from which power could be wielded over the entirety of its huge empire. No city in the world was richer. No city in the world had more time for leisure and thought. The Valyrians, aided by their connection to their dragons, delved into the secrets of sorcery, and learnt magics that no other people in the world has ever been able to replicate. Magics of fire and blood. They made dragonbinding horns and glass candles, dragonstone and Valyrian steel. And they also made art and poetry and music and philosophy and theology. There were parades unparalleled in militaristic grandeur, boasting of the downfall of their enemies; and there were gardens of unparalleled beauty, tended as much by magic as by human hands. In every way, the bad and the good, the dark and the light, Valyria was the centre of civilisation—the closest thing that there has ever been to a capital of the world.  
  
Man could not overthrow the Valyrian Freehold, for man is not dragon. Only the gods could do that.  
  
And this they did, when came the Doom.


End file.
